Stand up and Fight, Canada

There are two Americas, a situation not unlike circa 1860. Back then, there were those for slavery, and those against, and in 2019, there are those for abortion, and those against, or those for the unborn, and those, well, who would have them put to death at the whim of their mother.

Thus, we have Alabama, about to pass the most highly restrictive abortion law in the United States, or, seen another more positive way, the most highly protective of the life of the unborn, including such coercive penalties as 99-year jail terms for abortionists, and no exceptions for the vague ‘mental health’ of the mother.

The usual suspects have gone ga-ga, Like the lady crooner of the same name, calling the law ‘heinous’. Chris Evans – who ironically plays the all-American 1950’s-values jingoistic superhero Captain America – describing the law as ‘absolutely unbelievable’, and the now-ubiquitous Alyssa Milano even more ironically posting a picture of her holding her daughter, with the tag, ‘her rights are human rights’. One might assume that would include her right to life and to be born. Would Ms. Milano admit that she would have a serene conscience had she had that same girl murdered twelve or so years earlier?

On the other side of the chasm – literally and otherwise – we have Nevada, wherein lies that city of sin, Las Vegas, about to pass the most ‘liberal’ abortion law, removing almost all restrictions and protection of the unborn, making it a lot like, say, Canada.

I found this exchange between Republican Senator Scott Hammond, who is fighting the bill, and Democrat Yvanna Cancela, who is spearheading it, instructive:

An opponent of the bill, GOP senator Scott Hammond, said husbands should have the right to be notified if their wives are contemplating abortion. “As a father, you want to ask so it makes her think for a second about the consequences she’s undertaking. I think it’s really relevant, if not medically relevant. This is a highly charged event in somebody’s life.”

Sen. Cancela disagreed and likened a requirement for a wife to inform her husband about a contemplated abortion to requiring husbands to inform their wives about vasectomy.

Does Ms. Cancela actually think that men should be allowed to get vasectomies – a nearly irreversible procedure severing the vas deferens, turning what was once a man more or less into a quasi-eunuch – and not tell their wives? And that wives may have their pre-born children clinically murdered and not tell their husbands? Is this what we have come to in the muddled, messed-up minds of these minions?

There is not much room for amicable middle-ground on issues such abortion which, even more so than slavery, is one of those all-or-none questions, with the central principle being the metaphysical question of what it means to be a ‘person’. Irrefutable medical, genetic and physiological evinces that an unborn child is a ‘human individual’, but we must also all in turn agree that such a ‘human individual’ is also a ‘human person’, with all the dignity accruing thereto, including all due protection in law, not least the protection of the right to life. Just as the United States had to agree in the past century and a half that all humans were persons, regardless of skin colour, race, gender or any other accidental criteria.

The deeper problem is that once our culture has lost the idea of human personhood, deriving from the relation of each human’s unique relationship to God, his creator, as the only creature God willed specifically ‘for his own sake’. Only when we all hold that principle – which derives from our view of religion and God Himself – that law will follow suit. For, as Leo XIII taught, a society without religion can never be well governed. Or, qua Dosotyevsky, without God, anything goes.

At least in America, politicians, and many others, are willing to take sides and fight. We may hope to avoid a civil war, but the cultural war must continue to the bitter end, and if it comes to taking up arms, so be it.

Alas for poor milquetoast Canada, where, like bland tapioca pudding, our political parties refuse to take a stand for the unborn, unwilling to touch the divisive issue with a ten-foot microphone. All the while, babies die by the thousands, and lives, consciences, souls are ruined. We may ask, where is our Captain Canuck, who can take back our country. But, then – with my own misgivings about the whole deus ex machina superhero schtick -should we all not be heroes in the cause of life?

Like Ms. Abby Johnson – and we need a Protestant, ex-Planned Parenthood employee to tell us this (why not a Catholic bishop, one might ask?) – said at the recent March: Let’s stand up and fight. And, I might myself add as an immigrant to this fair land once filled with hardy men – stop the sycophantic, kiss-up, cowardly schtick – and I’m exhorting you, all Conservatives – put back in your platform, officially and personally, a right to life for all human beings, which even fictional elephants can grasp, that a person’s a person, no matter how small.

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Catholic Insight seeks to enlighten hearts and minds by proclaiming the splendour of truth and the sanctity of life. It endeavours to foster the culture of life by reporting truthfully, critically, contextually, and comparatively with a view to history and guided by a cultural vision inspired by Catholic doctrine and the classical liberal arts.